Tag Archive: legal update

As most of you already know, Mumia was transferred to SCI-Mahanoy in upstate PA. more than a month ago, directly after Phila. prosecutor Seth Williams announced that he wasn’t pursuing the death penalty in Mumia’s case. This meant that Mumia’s sentence went from death to life in prison without parole.

Since arriving at SCI-Mahanoy, Mumia has been in the hole, on AC (administrative custody) status, solitary confinement, even though there is no valid reason for him to be in the hole. The conditions are torturous and much worse than the conditions on death row. These conditions have been condemned by the United Nations as torturous.

Since arriving at Mahanoy, Superintendent John Kerestes and his staff have gone from one thing to the next to vent their fury and racism on Mumia. First they claimed to be waiting on paperwork that Mumia’s sentence is a life sentence and not death, but Mahanoy has no death chamber, so Mumia would never be sent there if he still had a death sentence. (more…)

Jeremy Hawthorne, arrested September 5th, 2011 while on a Copwatch patrol, is going on trial before a jury for allegedly slashing 7 tires on Virginia Commonwealth University vehicles, including two police cars. The charge is Destruction of State Property > $1,000, a Class 6 Felony.

The case is clearly politically motivated; as a part of Richmond Copwatch, Jeremy is one of several who have been targeted by Richmond police in past months for their work against police brutality and poor jail conditions in the city. The notoriously heavy-handed RPD and its officers, ever the subject of much controversy, have bristled and taken a particularly antagonistic attitude with activists, protestors, and copwatchers, reacting in a consistently aggressive, violent, and reckless manner. Accountability, on the other hand, has been elusive. (more…)

The last few months have been a very busy time for me. I am very happy to report that some progress has been made in several areas. The best news to date is the progress with my parole situation. Since my last update letter, my lawyer filed a request for a parole hearing for me. I had the hearing on November 30, 2011. I met with two commissioners and they decided to advance my case to the next level of the parole process for persons with life sentences. That level requires a psychological evaluation, which means that sometime in the near future I will be transferred to another institution for a three month evaluation. This whole process is called a Risk Assessment, and once this level is completed the case goes before the full body of the parole commission. There are ten commissioners and a majority vote is required before the case can be sent to the governor who has the final right to approve or deny.

Thanks to all of you who wrote support letters or sent cards. One of the key reasons for moving my case forward was the enormous amount of community support reflected by those letters and cards. You all really helped, thank you once again. For those who did not know that this process was underway, it happened fast, but there is still time for you to write. The case will go before the full commission and the members will once again read the letters of support. So please continue to send letters requesting parole to:
Mr. David Bloomberg
6776 Reisterstown Rd.
Baltimore, MD. 21215 (more…)

From Sacramento Prisoner Support:
On Wednesday, December 8, the 9th circuit court of appeals denied Eric’s request for a rehearing en banc. This means, in theory, that 11 judges reviewed Eric’s petition for a rehearing and not a single one of them found any merit in the arguments detailed within. After nearly 5 years of political maneuvering on the part of the government and a complete and total lack of any sanity or logic in the court’s decisions, this came as no surprise to Eric and his loved ones.

However, that fact does not lessen the blow of this cruel decision by the 9th circuit. This was, in effect, Eric’s last available option in the appeals process (other than appealing to the extremely conservative supreme court). Hope has proven to be a fleeting, evasive creature throughout this whole process. Many of us knew better than to fall for its seductive overtures. But hearts are so often blind to what our minds know to be truth – even when we knew what the outcome would be, our hearts had trouble letting go. We wanted Eric out here, with us. Free to wander in ancient forests, to play in the swirling, roaring ocean. To live outside a cage. But now, whatever traces of hope may have remained have been scattered in the wind.

For some of us, our biggest mistake was believing that we ever had any options in the first place. It became all too easy to fall into their trap of successive illusory next-chances. Every time we lost bail, or a motion, or trial, or at sentencing, or at the appeal… there was always something waiting in the queue that could possibly save us from our imminent hell. But the state created that queue – not us. And it was set up to keep us on the hook – to keep us invested in a system (a system that many of us never believed in to begin with) that would never deliver what we most wanted = our friend, uncaged. As long as we believed that something might change somewhere on down the line, we had to keep putting time and energy into this behemoth of injustice. (more…)